ECAS 2013

Economic fraud and political corruption at both elite and non-elite levels are widespread and endemic in many African societies that have undergone neoliberal reforms and transformations in the past two decades. Public debates about the moral features and dynamics of contemporary societal and political-economic orders are prevalent. Discourses around moral decline and crisis, as well as moral revival, are intensive; so are the various state-orchestrated anti-corruption and anti-fraud campaigns. In this paper it is argued that these dynamics are interrelated parts of the emergence and consolidation of moral economies of neoliberalism in Africa. It uses the case of fraud in Uganda to analyse the key structures and processes that produce this neoliberal web of moral economies and sheds light on the distinctive features of the latter. It furthermore regards actually existing moralities as both an empirical and political phenomenon. To that end, it explores how aspects of political economy and moral economy are intertwined and interact and thus constitute specific political moral economies in the study case. In a final section, the paper advocates that more scholarship is needed (i) to study the (cultural) political economy of actually existing moral norms, and (ii) to track the political-moral-economic underpinnings of social practices in neoliberal Africa more generally. The study of the changing practices and morals of interacting with others in the economy - i.e. defrauding/harming others - is a fruitful starting point for such a project. Empirical material from Uganda is used to develop and drive the analysis throughout the paper.

This paper examines the moral economy of migration and achievement in Ghana. It explores the local category of 'Burghers' - a term used to characterize successful migrants from Western and North African countries. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2012 and 2013, the paper analyzes the social and moral status of 'Burghers' as well as patterns of authority, obligations and expectations vis-à-vis their families and communities.

The paper argues that the position and status of 'Burghers' is ambivalent. On the one hand, 'Burghers' are widely admired for their material wealth, Western lifestyle, and ability to care well for their family members in Ghana. Furthermore being a 'Burgher' can be a way of surpassing and transforming social hierarchies and a fast mode of becoming a 'big man'. These aspects of the 'Burgher' position inspire notions of hope and achievement among young people in the region who often endeavor to realize their aspirations through irregular migration towards Europe or Libya.

On the other hand, however, 'Burghers' are seen as potentially morally corrupted by their life in the West and may quickly be dismissed as selfish and as lacking social accountability, or, if their migration projects do not succeed, as 'Burgher loose' - as 'failed migrants' and the antithesis of success. Likewise irregular migration is widely condemned among local authorities and the non-migrant established elite who promote education and regular migration as the morally and legally correct ways of achievement. There is thus a struggle between different moral economies and aspirations of success and status.

Clubs gather nowadays a membership of hundreds of prosperous professionals and executives, over golf courses, charity events or professional coaching sessions. Social and sports clubs indeed appeared during the first years of British colonization in East Africa, but the current growth of club membership owes to different social and historical processes than the sheer mimicry of colonial practices. Their success enlightens the local and global narrations in which African investment in these iconic avatars of bourgeois modernity are rooted. Such process is rooted in the formation of an urban upper class of professionals, managers and businesspersons; intimately related to the growth of a "private sector" which has to cope with the competition of political elites; and linked to the formation of a social group which understands itself as constituting a community of interests, sharing common imaginary of self-achievement, rooted in a nationalist vision of the country's development.

Clubs are significant in the making of trans-ethnic and trans-generational regimes of entrustment. They contribute to the promotion and actualization of elite lifestyles. Their membership mark a belonging to what we could term an imagined world bourgeoisie, a place where managers and professionals discuss and dream about Kenya becoming the Singapore or the Dubai of Africa. But clubs are also a contested ground, as they are also used to make-up inherited fortunes of uncertain origin, and to provide formerly corrupted businessmen and politicians with the bureaucratic attributes of respectability. And as private places, they represent a space where the origins of wealth and the responsibilities of social status are hardly questioned.